Inventing pollution: coal, smoke, and culture in Britain since 1800

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2022-10-20 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2022.2140994
P. Brimblecombe
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

for example, a psychology article or literary analysis. The claim that, for ToM, mental states are propositional is most obviously mistaken in those cases where our understanding of other people’s minds is spontaneous and simulative rather than effortful and inferential. This in turn brings us to perhaps the central problem with Walser’s treatment of ToM. She fails to distinguish its components and varieties. The most fundamental of these divisions is between ToM inference and ToM simulation. A number of Walser’s criticisms apply solely to the former, if they apply at all. Walser also repeatedly refers to heuristics that we employ in ToM. Though she is not entirely clear about her understanding of heuristics, it is undoubtedly the case that we do use heuristics. But they are important primarily in spontaneous ToM responses. Effortful inference can be a straightforward matter of logical entailment. Other distinctions concern whether the ToM addresses information processing or emotion; personality/disposition, affective state (e.g., mood), or situation (and so on) – all of which bear in some way on Walser’s claims. Of course, readers ofWalser’s book are likely to be particularly interested in her treatment of the literaryworks. Here, too, there are recurring problems, related to her concernwith debunking ToM. For one thing, she often fails to consider alternatives that are prima facie more plausible. For example, she discusses a recurring motif in Charles Brockden Brown, where characters expect to find crucial information inside of some container, but open the container and find nothing of value. I suppose this could be a criticism of the container metaphor of mind, but – based on Walser’s evidence – it could equally be a comment on materialism (one doesn’t find motives as such when one looks in a brain), or free will, or something else. But of course there is more to Walser’s book than I have suggested. I began by saying that most literary readers will react very differently than I have. Literary critics are particularly likely to find her literary analyses rewarding. Indeed, even partisans of ToM will – rightly – find many of her literary observations genuinely illuminating, particularly in her discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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发明污染:1800年以来英国的煤炭、烟雾和文化
例如心理学文章或文学分析。对于ToM来说,心理状态是命题的说法在我们对他人心理的理解是自发和模拟的,而不是努力和推理的情况下是最明显的错误。这反过来又把我们带到了沃尔瑟对待ToM的核心问题上。她无法区分其成分和品种。这些划分中最基本的是ToM推理和ToM模拟。沃尔瑟的一些批评只适用于前者,如果它们适用的话。Walser还反复提到我们在ToM中使用的启发式方法。尽管她并不完全清楚自己对启发式的理解,但毫无疑问,我们确实使用了启发式。但它们主要在自发的ToM反应中很重要。费力的推理可以是一个直接的逻辑蕴涵问题。其他区别涉及ToM是否涉及信息处理或情感;性格/性格、情感状态(如情绪)或情境(等等)——所有这些都在某种程度上与沃尔瑟的主张有关。当然,沃尔瑟这本书的读者可能会对她处理文学作品的方式特别感兴趣。在这里,也有一些反复出现的问题,与她对揭露ToM的担忧有关。首先,她经常不考虑表面上看起来更合理的替代方案。例如,她讨论了查尔斯·布罗克登·布朗中反复出现的一个主题,在这个主题中,角色希望在某个容器中找到关键信息,但打开容器却一无所获。我想这可能是对心理容器隐喻的批评,但基于沃尔瑟的证据,它同样可能是对物质主义(当你在大脑中观察时,你不会发现动机)、自由意志或其他东西的评论。当然,沃尔瑟的书比我所说的要多得多。我首先说,大多数文学读者的反应与我截然不同。文学评论家尤其可能发现她的文学分析是有收获的。事实上,即使是托姆的党派人士也会——理所当然地——发现她的许多文学观察真的很有启发性,尤其是在她对哈里特·比彻·斯托的讨论中。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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